@KitFox "This blog post is a writing exercise from writers.stackexchange.com. Visit the Writers chat room every Tuesday for new writing exercises. This week's exercise: A short story with 2 paragraphs, no dialogue, containing a rusty nail, a tulip, and the word "spangled". "

I actually considered taking my story in a completely different direction. Like discussing the garden, etc, but then a giant tulip walks around the corner and stabs me with a rusty nail while singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

@KitFox "This blog post is a writing exercise from writers.stackexchange.com. Visit the Writers chat room every Tuesday for new writing exercises. This week's exercise: A short story with 2 paragraphs, no dialogue, containing a rusty nail, a tulip, and the word "spangled". "

@KitFox yeah, me too. I found it telling that the setting is unusual, and yet not uinrealistic (ok, some kind of architecture, pillars, fine) but the guy with seeming modern gear (beer cans?) is muttering incantations while planting a mundane flower in an odd place.

@KitFox I agree. It's a good reminder and a good metaphor, because tulips don't last that long (although they are perennial... probably an annual would work better but then it wouldn't fit the exercise)

Also, to slow it down, I'd suggest that rather than "because of my stupid actions that I took to bring down this entire system" you might use something more vague and mysterious like "because I sent a memo to the wrong people." That way, you don't tell us the ending of the story right at the beginning.

She was fading now, she knew. She was a little bowed over, her spangled skirt had developed creases, her powder had begun to cake up. But, oh, how the others had fought for her attention! Well, her boys were prone to hyperbole, and she was not sure how to credit their stories. She herself had met none of her lovers. But her boys had told her there were none to rival her.

He lay still beneath her, waiting. He remembered the three times before. Wordlessly she had sprung up out of the cold and the wet, dropped one garment after another, curled up near him, and then blown away. He yearned to stab into her, hold her close, he whose strength had once bound trees together. But now he was wasting away, too weak to hang on to anything.